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Dear Egg Donor Angel

In Spain Egg Donation has been regulated by law for more than 30 years. Therefore, we might think that society has normalised it and that nowadays it no longer surprises or bothers anyone. But it is still a topic surrounded by myths and taboos, so it is understandable that both donors and recipient couples or women have doubts about the process.

Firstly, Egg Donation is a completely anonymous procedure: the recipient female won’t know the identity of the donor and she won’t know who the future parents and the resulting child are. Moreover, after the treatment and during the pregnancy, the parents will only get to know the age and blood group of their donor.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you for this precious gift. We wish all the best for you and your family.”

And how do the patients who have decided to undergo treatment using anonymous egg donation feel? It is not easy to accept that they only will become parents thanks to the use of an anonymous woman that agreed to help them. It’s painful to give up sharing genetics with your baby, something they’ve always taken for granted. But, after this process of “genetic mourning” and acceptance, when the desired baby finally arrives, they only feel immense gratitude.

Our fertility clinic frequently receives anonymous letters to the donors, whose identity is unknown to the intended parents. Letters that show what they feel when they receive the biggest gift that somebody can give: their baby. Below we show a letter that former patients wrote to their donor:

Feelings about Egg Donation

Dear Egg Donor Angel

There will never be enough words to properly thank you for what you have done for us. However, we hope that this letter goes some way to expressing our deep gratitude.

While we are not permitted to identify ourselves to you, we believe it may be ok to tell you a little about how we came to need your special gift.

By the time we finally found each other, me and my (now) husband were already in our late 30s. We had both, separately, wanted to be parents but had never found the right partners. When we did eventually meet, we both realised quite quickly that we had found our life partner. We started trying for a family and we were married.

Unfortunately, we had no success conceiving a child, so turned to IVF. During two hole years we attempted six rounds of IVF using my eggs. While I was able to produce eggs, they were poor quality. Time after time we saw our dreams dwindle as many of my eggs were either immature or failed to fertilise. For those that did fertilise, the resulting embryos did not survive past Day 4. During our third round we tried transferring one embryo, but that resulted in biochemical pregnancy. Again, we were devastated by this loss.

In the end of the second year, we were advised that it would be unlikely that we could have a child using my own eggs. This news was heart breaking. After a long period of grieving we realised that we still wanted to have a family so we decided to seek the help of an egg donor. Since that time we have been searching the world for the right donor program and the right donor.

We were very impressed with IVF-Spain. In particular, we liked the way we choose donors. We know that a lot of effort has gone into choosing you to be our Donor Angel. We are confident that you are an amazing, kind and generous person. Just the fact that you would volunteer to put yourself through the process shows how wonderful you must be.

Please be assured that any child that we have from this process will be loved and cherished deeply. We will do everything we can to give our child the best of everything. We both have large families, so our child will have lots of aunties, uncles and cousins and a Nanna who will dote on him or her endlessly. We have also a lovely home with a big backyard and a swimming pool as well as a fantastic dog who loves children.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for this precious gift. We wish all the best for you and your family.